P.J. O'Rourke ( ! ),
contribution to
"Sixty Things a Man Should Know",
Esquire magazine, OCT 93
included in
Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut,
page 201
Okay, so O'Rourke is no
Bertrand Russell, but hey,
take a look --
" "You all remember," said the Controller, in his strong deep voice, "you all remember, I suppose, that beautiful and inspired saying of Our Ford's: 'History is bunk'. History," he repeated slowly, "is bunk."
He waved his hand; and it was as though, with an invisible feather whisk, he brushed away a little dust ... "
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
"... when people talk about the canon or the great people of the past or great texts, they often say, "Well, but you know, those were tainted, they came out of cultures that were wrong, that had sins and crimes and evils...." Which is all quite true. Nonetheless, when we go back in history, we choose out the things that are of continuing use. And those become meeting places, so that they're like a streetlamp where everybody comes together to talk and argue together where they can see each other. That's the way he has been. If you want to talk about liberty and the development of it in the modern world, you almost have to talk about Jefferson. And since people have been doing that for 200 years, there's a rich continuing conversation which we join when we get under that lamp."
Interview with author Garry Wills
(C.S. Lewis) " '... it's not the remembered past, it's the forgotten past that enslaves us. And I think that's true of society. … I think no class of men (and women) are less enslaved to the past than historians. It is the unhistorical who are usually, without knowing it, enslaved to a very recent past.' (From a radio adaptation of Lewis's inaugural lecture as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature given at Cambridge on Nov. 29, 1954 ...)
During wartime, Lewis sharpened the point. He compared the reader of history to the man who has lived in many places. This man 'is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.' ("Learning in War-Time," in The Weight of Glory.)
Top Ten Reasons to Read Christian History
by Chris Armstrong
This is from the non-denominational Christian ministry
Christianity Today International, founded by Billy Graham.
Fear of God by Chris Orlet
Bad Subjects, Issue # 50 , June 2000
Mark Twain
"THOSE OLD GUYS, THEY STOLE ALL OUR BEST LINES"
here.
© 1999 David Lance Goines. "Though I have not been able
to find the exact source, my memory is that it was said
by the type designer Frederick W. Goudy,
in reference to type designers of ages gone past."
I'm coming to believe that a broad and deep familiarity with the Canon -- the "classics" -- is the surest indication of what I'd call an excellent education. I don't know whether this familiarity in and of itself results in a good education, but it looks like a good hypothesis.
The Canon in Western culture has traditionally meant the great works of Greece, Rome, and Christian Europe, but it's past time that Westerners became more familiar with the works of other cultures as well.
I am tempted to define an adult as "a person who is familiar with all the details of the Canon and can discuss them intelligently".
(Leaving aside for the moment exactly which works we wish to enumerate as constituting the Canon.)
If this seems too harsh for you, perhaps we might consider that facility with the Canon should constitute an important part of the definition of citizen.
There's an old saw that goes:
"A fool is one who makes a mistake, doesn't learn from it, and continues to repeat it.
An ordinary person is one who makes a mistake, learns from it, and doesn't repeat it.
A wise person is one who learns from the mistakes made by others and doesn't make them in the first place."
The Canon can be viewed as the collective record and analysis of humanity´s real and potential mistakes.
If there is one lesson we should learn from the Canon, it is to be on our guard against repeating the mistakes of the past.
(Take a look at Terence, This is Stupid Stuff by A. E. Housman for a comment from the poet.)
If there is one lesson I learn from looking around me, it is that people cannot be trusted to do this.
"I find it interesting because we always think we're smarter than that, when history proves *exactly* the opposite. The Big Lie, spoken not just openly, but loudly, firmly and with conviction, has been one of the most successful tactics in history.-- ellipsis a mix of mine and JMS's
... the public didn't suddenly wake up, hear the voice of the fanatic, and say, "Hey, this guy's nuts!" They bought it. Because they were primed to believe it. Because they wanted to believe it. Because they were afraid *not* to believe it. ...
Most of her dialogue was paraphrased from actual speeches given over the decades, or longer, by fanatical leaders to their followers. There's bits of Hitler, of Goerring, of Goebbels... bits of McCarthy, bits of Stalin, bits of Pat Buchanan and Rep. Dornan. Because people fell for it. It did work. It does work. And it will *continue* to work... for as long as people think that THEY would NEVER fall for such a thing...."
"Would anyone want to go to any other university, if he(sic) could get into this one?
from "Only Adults Can Be Educated",
Max Weismann interviews Mortimer J. Adler
in "Philosophy is Everybody's Business:
Journal of the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas",
Vol 3, No 1, 1996.
"It is not the same list of authors and works that was included in the Great Books of the Western World. Nonetheless it has been suggested and inspired by the work of Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, who were the editors of the 1952 edition of the GBWW. This index is at attempt to guide readers to available online editions of those and other great books."
Well, this hyperlinked list omits a few of my picks,
but it's certainly a great effort.
"The key to this collection, published by Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., is the Syntopicon, which enables the reader to trace the development of selected ideas from author to author over the centuries. ... For this purpose, it is recommended that those works marked by a > be read in order, preferably before beginning college."
"Do you need a liberal education?
We say that it is unpatriotic not to read these books.
- You may reply that you are patriotic enough without them.
We say that you are gravely cramping your human possibilities if you do not read these books.
- You may answer that you have troubles enough already.
This answer is one that Ortega attacks in The Revolt of the Masses. It assumes that we can leave all intellectual activity, and all political responsibility, to somebody else and live our lives as vegetable beneficiaries of the moral and intellectual virtue of other men (sic). .... The democratic enterprise is imperiled if any one of us says, 'I do not have to try to think for myself, or make the most of myself, or become a citizen of the world republic of learning.' The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment. (Page 80)
The reply that Edmund Burke gave to the movement for the extension of the suffrage is the one that the majority of men unconsciously supports. Burke developed the doctrine of "virtual representation", which enabled him to claim that all power should reside in the hands of the few, in his case in the hands of the landed aristocracy. They had the qualifications for governing: intelligence, leisure, patriotism, and education. They "virtually" represented the rest of the community, even though the rest of the community had not chosen them to do so. .... Dramatically opposed to a position such as that of Burke is the American faith in democracy, and in education in relation to democracy, stated succinctly by Jefferson: "I know of no safe repository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education."
We who say, then, that we believe in democracy cannot content ourselves with virtual education any more than we can with virtual representation. We have not the option of deciding for ourselves whether or not we shall be liberal artists, because we are committed to the proposition that all men shall be free. We cannot admit that ordinary people cannot have a good education, because we cannot agree that democracy must involve a degradation of the human ideal. Anything less than the effort to help everybody get the best education necessarily implies that some cannot achieve in their own measure our human ideal. We cannot concede that the conquest of nature, the conquest of drudgery, and the conquest of political power must lead in combination to triviality in education and hence in all the other occupations of life. The aim of education is wisdom, and each must have the chance to become as wise as he can."
"Western culture has not survived this century; we float and make our lives, says Steiner, from the surface wreckage, the post-culture, and in the depths the largest fragments anchor vast, proliferating reefs of coral scholarship. ...
The death of the culture is not just the breaking of the chain of tradition, of reference. The confidence of the culture has been shattered as well. The automatic, unself-conscious elitism it once possessed is gone -- Western culture is unique for its assaults on itself -- and the unforced ease with which it distinguished and evaluated, created hierarchy and gave itself a high place therein is lost to all but the fatuous. That the great events of our century -- the ``Thirty Year's War'' of 1914-1945, the genocides, the bureaucratization of terror and torture and death, the real possibility of deliberate human extinction at the press of a button -- that these were even possible would have struck those of prior centuries as ``nightmarish jokes.'' The optimistic beliefs of those centuries, of the prior tradition -- that there is progress, that the humanities make one humane, that ``the future is holy'' -- in their turn begin to seem like nightmarish jokes."
" '... we must find a way of sharing aesthetic, philosophical experience which makes us more responsive to human pain, and not less'.
Steiner is often attacked as an elitist ('To be part of an elite means loving passionately and not negotiating your passions. If that's elitism, I plead guilty'). He believes 'very few human beings can understand a proposition of Kant or Spinoza, or a fugue by Bach - or care to', and notes with resignation that 'the planetary language is football' (Presumably "Association Football" -- "Soccer" in the USA). Warning of the erosion of language and literacy by mass communication and mass consumption, he questions whether there is something anti-democratic about great art: 'The great traditional "high" cultures have disturbingly flourished under despotic and oligarchic sytems (Periclean Athens is often given as a counterexample. Yes, they kept slaves and women were not allowed to vote). Whether a truly populist, egalitarian society takes to the achievements of "high" culture is an open question. But it would be idiotic to be like King Canute. The reality today is mass marketing, mass consumption, mass media. To lament that is an arrogant impudence'."
"...let me highly recommend a reading program heavy on ancient, medieval and premodern world history -- the kind of books that give one a sobering sense of the magnitude of the political landscape and of the shattering ruin of culture after culture that believed itself eternal and insuperable."
-- Camille Paglia Salon, MAY 1998
"JOHN HEATH: ... over the last 30 years we've had a tremendous decline in the number of students studying the ancient languages. We've dropped 80 percent in the high schools at least; we've dropped between 20 and 40 percent in the colleges. The kinds of things students are studying has changed drastically. ...
DAVID GERGEN: Well, for years and years, of course, Americans did study the classics. The founding fathers seemed to be steeped in the classics, great admirers of the Greeks, especially the Romans, when you think of Jefferson or Adams, or Madison.
JOHN HEATH: ... The founding fathers were steeped in the classics in Greek and Latin and in the traditions of the democracy of Athens, the republicanism of ancient Rome, and these things influenced their interpretation of what a "polis," a community should be.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: ... I think especially now in our own culture, we were interested in the cultural values. And that consists of a core menu or protocols of consensual government, free enterprise, private properties, civil liberties, free speech.
DAVID GERGEN: All of these institutions originated with the Greeks.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: We can't trace them any earlier than the Greeks, and yet they are adapted, rejected, modified. But that blueprint survives in the West."
"The outlines of the post-Cold War world have now emerged. ... Post-industrialization, with its miniaturization, puts power in the hands of anyone with a laptop and a pocketful of plastic explosives.
So we will have new evils and chronic instability. The world will truly be ancient. ...
The United States requires a generation of policymakers armed with a classical education. ...
The curriculum should consist of ancient historians and philosophers and those who have carried on their tradition: Machiavelli, Burke, Hobbes, Gibbon, Kant, Madison, Hamilton, Tocqueville, Mill, and, in the twentieth century, Berlin, Raymond Aron, Arnold Toynbee, Reinhold Niebuhr, and George Kennan. ...
What most of these men have in common is skepticism and a constructive realism. Machiavelli and the eighteenth-century Briton Edmund Burke both thought that conscience was a pretense to cover self-interest. Hobbes instructed that faith must be excluded from philosophy, because it is not supported by reason; reason concerns cause and effect, and so philosophy ultimately concerns the resolution of forces; and in politics this leads to the balance of power and a search for order. As distasteful as the ideas of Machiavelli and Hobbes may seem to the contemporary mind, those two philosophers invented the modern state. They saw that all men needed security in order to acquire material possessions, and that a bureaucratic organ was required to regulate the struggle for acquisition peacefully and impartially. The aim of such an organ was never to seek the highest good, only the common good."
"As I first learned from Brian Stock's Augustine the Reader, contemplative reading is the purest act of intelligence, the main way in which our humanity is expressed -- and protected."
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search keywords baseball cap
"... during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abbatoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.
We Americans are the only ones who didn't get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals, and with anything like intellectualism, even to the point of not reading books any more, though we are literate. We seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media. Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it's explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence.
A huge, rich, nuclear-tipped culture that propagates its core values through media steepage seems like a bad idea. There is an obvious risk of running astray here. Words are the only immutable medium we have, which is why they are the vehicle of choice for extremely important concepts like the Ten Commandments, the Koran, and the Bill of Rights. Unless the messages conveyed by our media are somehow pegged to a fixed, written set of precepts, they can wander all over the place and possibly dump loads of crap into people's minds.
To traditional cultures, especially word-based ones such as Islam, this is infinitely more threatening than the B-52s ever were. It is obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords, multiculturalism and diversity, are false fronts that are being used (in many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences. The basic tenet of multiculturalism (or "honoring diversity" or whatever you want to call it) is that people need to stop judging each other -- to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful, that God exists and has this or that set of qualities.
The lesson most people are taking home from the Twentieth Century is that, in order for a large number of different cultures to coexist peacefully on the globe (or even in a neighborhood) it is necessary for people to suspend judgment in this way. Hence (I would argue) our suspicion of, and hostility towards, all authority figures in modern culture. As David Foster Wallace has explained in his essay "E Unibus Pluram," this is the fundamental message of television; it is the message that people take home, anyway, after they have steeped in our media long enough. It's not expressed in these highfalutin terms, of course. It comes through as the presumption that all authority figures -- teachers, generals, cops, ministers, politicians -- are hypocritical buffoons, and that hip jaded coolness is the only way to be.
The problem is that once you have done away with the ability to make judgments as to right and wrong, true and false, etc., there's no real culture left. All that remains is clog dancing and macrame. The ability to make judgments, to believe things, is the entire point of having a culture. I think this is why guys with machine guns sometimes pop up in places like Luxor, and begin pumping bullets into Westerners. ... When their sons come home wearing Chicago Bulls caps with the bills turned sideways, the dads go out of their minds.
The global anti-culture that has been conveyed into every cranny of the world by television is a culture unto itself, and by the standards of great and ancient cultures like Islam and France, it seems grossly inferior, at least at first. The only good thing you can say about it is that it makes world wars and Holocausts less likely -- and that is actually a pretty good thing!
The only real problem is that anyone who has no culture, other than this global monoculture, is completely screwed. Anyone who grows up watching TV, never sees any religion or philosophy, is raised in an atmosphere of moral relativism, learns about civics from watching bimbo eruptions on network TV news, and attends a university where postmodernists vie to outdo each other in demolishing traditional notions of truth and quality, is going to come out into the world as one pretty feckless human being. And -- again -- perhaps the goal of all this is to make us feckless so we won't nuke each other.
On the other hand, if you are raised within some specific culture, you end up with a basic set of tools that you can use to think about and understand the world. You might use those tools to reject the culture you were raised in, but at least you've got some tools."
-- emphasis and links are mine -- ed.
You will also want to read / "Jihad vs. McWorld" / and comments from David Brin.
Really. You will.
"I was copied a note from someone on another newsgroup who insisted that everything in the show had an elvish/ Tolkien base, including and *especially* the names of everyone, citing the (name of the starship) Agamemnon as meaning something or other in LoTR (Lord of the Rings) elvish. The symbol is RIGHT THERE, in the name, Agamemnon, and the whole unfortunate history of that character and his wife, and the Cassandra character ...
My background is as an SF fan myself, so I offer the above without stereotype or pejorative intent. But as well as reading SF, I spent most of my early adult life reading from classical sources. Goethe's FAUST informs Londo in many ways, as well as the history of early Rome, and Hegelian notions on the role of conflict, and the divine role of the emperor. You're talking to someone who read Plotinus' The Aenneads just for kicks, and whose favorite character was Zeno and his paradoxes. You want to talk Plato's perfect forms? The Socratic method of teaching? Greek tragic structure as embodied in Oedipus? The overall work of Sophocles? The Bible? I've read that one cover to cover twice... anyone else in the room who's done that, raise your hands and tell me you didn't fall asleep halfway through Numbers and Deuteronomy, the two most boring books in the whole darned thing.
There was a period in my life -- from around 1976 through 1981 -- when I devoured everything I could in these areas. Mythology. Existentialism. Zen. 18th century literature. I took part time jobs in libraries so I could get access to the widest possible range of books, especially new ones in areas that interested me. A lot of the details have washed away over the years, but the cumulative *sense* of that remains. I can still remember how excited I was when a brand new translation of the Inferno, the Purgatario and the Paradisio came out (from Penguin, I think), putting it all back into the proper lyric form, and I devoured them, one day each, then read them all again using the footnotes and marginalia."
"When the woman told one of my producers, Nancy, and I this story, Nancy like looked at me and she's like,
'I don't know what it is about that story, but I know I'm supposed to remember that story. And there will come a time in my life where I will be called on to use that story in my own life. That is an instructive story'."
"History teaches three pretty clear messages. One is that all empires die. Second, empires take a long time to die. Finally, the citizens of the empire rarely recognize the warning signs for what they are.
The necessity for change is immutable. Empires by their natures do not change very well. They have had positive feedback for not changing -- usually it's called "standing by our principles" -- for years, even centuries.
Empires think they have beaten the rule of change. They haven't. Empires think size will protect them. It won't. Empires think military might will protect them. It won't. Empires think charismatic leaders will protect them. They won't. Nothing will. The old makes way for the new."